Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @10:07PM
from the all-your-internet-are-belong-to-us dept.

First time accepted submitter cvenky writes "The Indian Government is proposing to create an intergovernmental body 'to develop internet policies, oversee all internet standards bodies and policy organizations, negotiate internet-related treaties and sit in judgment when internet-related disputes come up.' This committee will be funded and staffed by the UN and will report to the UN General Assembly which effectively means the control of the internet passes on to World Governments directly."

Yeah lets leave control of the internet to the usa after all it would never interfere, censor or otherwise abuse the internets! The USA is a beacon of pure and god fearing FREEDOM for everyone*! USA! USA! USA!

I could get behind this if it weren't the entire General Assembly, but instead just a selection of governments with some kind of free speech and representative democracy. Letting countries like China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Iran even have a vote seems ludicrous.

If you're talking about this [wikipedia.org], well, it's still up in the air. My cursory read of the articles tells me that it would mainly be about eliminating tariffs between South Asia countries. The cynic in me says that it's all about setting up cheap and exploitable labor in those countries to reduce costs.

And okay, that's where we failed. Shit like NAFTA has, ironically, put the people it was supposed to help out of business (such as Mexican corn farmers, a lot of whom now grow something else entirely). But our government has always been pretty shitty about stuff like this, but what are you gonna do? It won't affect an everyday American's ordinary life like SOPA, PIPA, or ACTA would, so you won't really see any action against it build up any sort of momentum, unfortunately.

tl;dr: America writes up shitty laws just like nearly every other country in history, but on the ones mentioned we're 3 for 4 in keeping those shitty laws from passing.

The ITU came up with a hell of a lot more than those. X.25 was the wire protocol used by Europe for a very long time - worked extremely well and was highly robust, compared to its US contemporary which was IPv0.

X.400 was probably heavier than necessary, but 99% of all work to improve on the limitations of SMTP have basically been reinventions of features X.400 had from the start.

X.500 exists today in the form of LDAP + ASN.1 + Digital Certificates + Federated methods of authentication. All these combined still don't cover the full spectrum of X.500 capabilities, but most of what's left wasn't really needed. However, there's nothing done today that wasn't in the standard. Not bad going.

Their other work includes little-known standards like JPEG, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.323 and ISDN, along with developing and standardizing technology that you can't possibly have heard of like wavelength-division multiplexing for optic fibre and DSL (yes, it's an ITU product as well).

Yes, they did the OSI model (which is still the basis for most networking) and SDL, but nobody's perfect.